We have an innate need to rise above ourselves, to open ourselves to higher influences.

Our present condition is imagining what we need to do in order to get above ourselves, never seeing that whatever we imagine belongs to our past, to something known. In a manner of speaking, it belongs to the very earth -- the body of ideas and social values, morals, traditions, religious icons -- all those things that seem to lift us, but in truth sit beneath us and drag us down into their world, into tension and further division.

You are, whether you see it or not, in a constant state of tension. There’s always something that has to be fought with and overcome. And the mind doesn’t discern. It can be fighting with its past. You can be tense because of relationships that have been gone for fifty years, but you don’t know it because the mind calls up an image, imbues it with the sensation and emotion from the experience, and then puts you in a struggle to try to free yourself from it… which is tension.

And every effort to free yourself using your mind is doomed to fail. It has to fail because you’re creating the bars of the prison through the activity of trying to liberate yourself. You make tension when you want to triumph over what you think you are.

Is it possible, at any moment (which is right now) to be aware of tension in yourself, and in that awareness of the tension, to be aware of the ascending spirit of higher influences whose presence is always present in you?

Any time that you bring your awareness into the whole of that tension and deliberately relax yourself from it, it’s just like an air balloon. You can sense the ascending spirit when you give your full awareness to releasing yourself from the fixation you have with your tension. The release of the tension opens the door for your awareness of this ascending movement in you.

Here is an exercise. Ask yourself this question: If I’m tense and I don’t know it, who am I? Where is my attention? Who has my attention? And for what is it being used if I’m tense and negative?

Purses used to have strings that you’d pull on to close the mouth of the purse. That’s exactly what tension does. It closes the purse string to the Divine. The purse of possibilities is closed off. Would you ever do that, consciously? Never. Yet, that’s exactly what happens.

That tension blinds us to the possibility of being present to the ascending spirit, the ascending force, the little part of us that wants to rise. Our awareness in the moment of tension is the invitation for an ascension that cannot be brought about any other way.

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